'Recovery Is Possible: Lessons in ‘ME/CFS’ Recovery from YouTube [Goldsmiths]

And then we also have this from July. I predict more to come

 
NHS Guidance pages due for review 28 May 2027.

In one of UKPoster's comments, they said they had "bigger fish to fry".

Thought it a strange and slightly out of context comment at the time. It's all starting to come into sharper focus now.
 
Yup I think set up a group - who is in?
Set out what we are looking to achieve - Letter to DoH
minister for ME/CFS cc solicitor

Might be worth catching up on the thread about the delayed Severe ME plan being put off being discussed until 2027

As annoying as the brain train (Choo Choo!) lobby is, they are probably for a different day.
Add me onto a group if you think I'll be of use /that's OK (I'm interested anyway).

be good if there are a number of us, I'm worse than normal atm.
 
NHS Guidance pages due for review 28 May 2027.

In one of UKPoster's comments, they said they had "bigger fish to fry".

Thought it a strange and slightly out of context comment at the time. It's all starting to come into sharper focus now.
I don't want to overwhelm you or push you beyond your limits. I don't know if you've seen this thread. Might be of interest.
 
NHS Guidance pages due for review 28 May 2027.

In one of UKPoster's comments, they said they had "bigger fish to fry".

Thought it a strange and slightly out of context comment at the time. It's all starting to come into sharper focus now.
I've found it.

Yes, this is a bit strange:

That’s a remarkable aspect.
Why do we not hear of any recent in-group fights between different brain retraining gurus?
Let’s assume for a second that there was no (0.0%) treatment effect to be had from these techniques for ME/CFS, wouldn’t we still expect the different movements to publicly critique each other’s approach as inferior?

Why is there apparently no advertisement drive to try to set one’s approach apart from the competition?
Because fundamentally people are really passionate about brain retraining, want to help people recover (often having used it themselves) and don't feel a need to compete in that way. It's that simple (in my view, anyway). And different programmes do suit different people so there is no real need to critique others. There's respect for the fact different offerings all have something to give. I have my personal views about one or two people working who I don't think are doing the work in the best way (their claims are too big, their work doesn't give enough of the psychoeducation I think is vital) but I don't have any influence over them and they're still helping people. I have bigger fish to fry, basically (although again, I don't sell courses or coaching)
 
I don't want to overwhelm you or push you beyond your limits. I don't know if you've seen this thread. Might be of interest.
No this is new to me and quite illuminating. Thank you. I suspect Coffi will be the trusted resource and peer support I referenced up thread or the recovery channel.

Well done @bobbler.

And, no doubt, here are the international bods supporting the Goldsmith Report as referred to in the the original advertisement for the Goldsmith research. I see Wessely and Chalder are still there and Coffi are now supporting children. https://www.coffi-collaborative.com/blank-9

Think I've seen enough for now.

Shan't be around for a few days. Last 4 days have been pretty full on for me especially the spurt over the few hours but worth the PEM.

Hopefully the above few posts give a flavour of my current thoughts, and why my solicitor needs a copy.

Edit

Back to the future, 1989 - as if all the legal proceedings, judicial reviews, deaths since and Regulation 28 Prevention of future deaths and parliamentary debates, NICE guidelines and Delivery plan, PACE and a whole lot more didn't happen

Make no mistake this will be institutional and political choices which they will need to defend.

 
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I have been deeply affected by some sad news tonight. A bit of an emotional rollercoaster all round today.

It has caused me to rethink who I write to as there is a serious political and institutional issue regarding this illness in the UK.

I now see no point in writing to the government or anyone else in this country, that much is self evident.

I propose I therefore write to the UN. It is after all a matter of human rights.

I shall, as a courtesy only, write to the Minister to forewarn him of the action I have taken without providing any detail. But then again I might not even bother to do that.

A copy of the UN letter will be placed with the bundle of papers held by my solicitors. I shall leave instructions with them to request the Coroner for an inquest into my death regardless of cause; just in case, as the UN complaint process can take a while, should they decide to investigate.

I shall not discuss this further on the public forum but will continue in an advocacy group in private.

If anyone thinks this is really bad idea, please feel to let me know.

It's about time we were treated with some dignity.

Edit. Forgot to add a link to the rights I'm referring to, so you see for yourselves what they are.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-persons-disabilities
 
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I posted this in 2025 when I raised my complaint with DHSC on the grounds of discrimination and their initial refusal to release the results of the public consultation, which was published shortly afterwards.


Non-discrimination and equality are fundamental human rights principles
and critical components of the right to health. The International Covenant
on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (art. 2 (2)) and the Convention
on the Rights of the Child (art. 2 (1)) identify the following non-exhaustive
grounds of discrimination: race, colour, sex, language, religion, political
or other opinion, national or social origin, property, disability, birth
or other status. According to the Committee on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights, “other status” may include health status (e.g., HIV/AIDS)

or sexual orientation. States have an obligation to prohibit and eliminate
discrimination on all grounds and ensure equality to all in relation to access
to health care and the underlying determinants of health. The International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (art. 5)
also stresses that States must prohibit and eliminate racial discrimination
and guarantee the right of everyone to public health and medical care.
Non-discrimination and equality further imply that States must recognize
and provide for the differences and specific needs of groups that
generally face particular health challenges, such as higher mortality
rates or vulnerability to specific diseases. The obligation to ensure non-
discrimination requires specific health standards to be applied to particular population groups, such as women, children or persons with disabilities

(see chap. II). Positive measures of protection are particularly necessary
when certain groups of persons have continuously been discriminated
against in the practice of States parties or by private actors.
Severe and very severe pwME, prevention of future deaths reports plus what's going on at Goldsmiths v non discrimination in research standards rights.

There is a clear pattern of behaviour being demonstrated which can be evidenced way back.

I can certainly lay out a draft of the basic breaches of human rights, but don't think I'm well enough to help with padding it out with detailed evidence in support of arguments.

Rest now.
 
Copied from a discussion thread

Does this mean that the BPS clinicians group now backs the provision of training run by unqualified influencers? I wonder what Wessely, Sharpe, White, Chalder, and the rest really think of what people like Realen Agle are doing. Surely as clinicians they can't condone it.

Link to the Executive Summary of the Goldsmith Report


The copy and paste function brought across some formatting but I'm too unwell to rectify it now. I'll try and come back to it tomorrow.

Recommenda?ons
1. Direct resources towards recovery research
Research on CFS would benefit from the inclusion of recovery, and CFS research funding
ought include recovery as an object of study. Social and cultural research could be brought
into conversa2on with psychology and other disciplines to offer a more meaningful account
of the lived experience of recovery.

The exis2ng knowledge of people who have been recovered can be studied and brought into
the realm of ins2tu2onal legi2macy, along with exis2ng non-medical approaches to
recovery. Non-medical approaches to recovery should be explored through pilot studies. The
experiences of those who have recovered should be objects of research in their own right.
People who have recovered ought to be included as stakeholders in (1) news media, (2)
research, (3) health policy and (4) pa2ent support and advocacy.

The focus on a pharmacological solu2on should be held in balance with the evidence of
recovery—not only in the recovery community but held in wider society.

2. Share recovery stories wherever possible
Social and cultural evidence shows that hope is a vital resource, communicated effec2vely by
first-person accounts of recovery. The public sector and pa2ent support groups should share
stories of recovery and send posi2ve messages of hope to people who are unwell.

3. Work with non-medical prac00oners
If, as these findings suggest, non-medical recovery prac22oners are leading the way in
knowledge, support and understanding, they should be brought into the research,
policymaking and public conversa2on about CFS recovery. Non-medical prac22oners could
be invited to work alongside policymakers, healthcare providers and pa2ent support and
advocacy groups. Social and cultural researchers and prac22oners of the arts and humani2es
with an interest in health should also work alongside non-medical prac22oners.

Clinicians who wish to refer pa2ents to holis2c, mind-body or non-medical support should
receive public health guidance to do so.

Public health is recommended to play a role in suppor2ng professional standards and
iden2fying other measures to generate public trust, to help guide people whose experience Recovery Report—Execu/ve Summar

Non-medical prac22oners with a track record of suppor2ng people to recover ought to be
included as stakeholders in (1) news media, (2) research, (3) health policy and (4) pa2ent
support and advocacy.

4. Give primary care professionals a voice
General prac22oners and other primary care professionals should have a voice in how
policymakers and pa2ent support and advocacy groups understand the experiences of those
who develop symptoms and then go on to recover.

5. Stop associa0ng CFS with non-recovery
If, as these findings suggest, recovery from CFS is not only possible but prac2cable with the
right support, guidance and condi2ons, non-recovery must lose its pride of place in the
public conversa2on about CFS.

No one can know if, when or how each and every person with CFS will recover. What we can
know is that in its current usage, the message of non-recovery causes harm. Associa2ng
non-recovery with CFS obstructs improvement by ex2nguishing hope. Obstruc2ng even the
smallest improvement can have the effect of stealing a person’s whole chance for recovery.
Every clinical encounter maZers.

If, as these findings suggest, recovery stories are key to the collec2ve ar2cula2on of recovery
and can catalyse individual recoveries, then their silencing is a major social injus2ce.

Claims regarding non-recovery are not supported by good research and should not be used
to discredit, misrepresent or vilify the accounts of those who have recovered.

Conclusion
The recovery interview is a lynchpin and mobilising force of digital recovery culture.
Recovery stories foster belief in recovery and offer prac2cal advice. They reveal a collec2ve
intelligence and know-how, and they epitomise the values of community and pedagogy that
are central to digital recovery culture. They also suggest a prac2ce of mutual aid within the
recovery community. The popular appeal and impact of the YouTube recovery interview
points to the value of recovery stories more widely.


The Recovery Report is a catalyst for further research and an invita2on to doctors,
policymakers and pa2ent support and advocacy groups to engage with those who have
recovered. It claims, unequivocally, that the experience of recovery is paZerned, and the
thema2c paZerning of recovery narra2ves provides one way of learning about what makes
recovery possible.
 
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Link to the Executive Summary of the Goldsmith Report


The copy and paste function brought across some formatting but I'm too unwell to rectify it now. I'll try and come back to it tomorrow.
I'm adding this in only in case anyone hasn't read the actually content of this report, because said foreward could mislead people into thinking it is primary research done with 'patients' who have 'recovered'. I've added in the page number where the facts are included, noting some are eg 30pages onwards into said report.

The foreward seems to be not forthcoming in this conflict of interest and whether the individuals or interviews are 'representative' either of patients who were diagnosed etc and have recovered in any sense those outside the field would use that term, rather than the storytelling 'recovery stories' given in videos for a website by those working in the field. The report itself is 188pages long and so few might ever look to find the follow correct details on external validity of the population and 'methods' vs the title of the report or claims as to what might be legitimately called for on the back of it

Actually

1. the 75 interviews were mostly of those who work in the recovery arena (page 30 in the 'report in numbers' section):

Almost two thirds of participants had started working in the recovery arena following their own recovery. This means, at the very least, that the majority of recovery interviews have been given by people with a substantial commitment to the project of recovery beyond reflecting on their own experience.

Most participants had stopped working during their illness, and most did not return to the same line of work once regaining their health. Many people report that this is because they developed a passion for wanting to help others recover.


2. Page 18 confirms that the suggestion these are 'recovered' people from ME/CFS isn't something that is verified in terms that any medical institution would expect:

The use of the term ‘recovery’ reflects its use by the community.

As the purpose of this report is to reflect the subjective, social and cultural reality of participants’ accounts, medical criteria have not been applied to assess them.

The experience of recovery and participants’ understanding of the meaning of the term is not uniform.

In fact I think it should be underlined that first line should be read as "The use of the term ‘recovery’ reflects its use by the Raelen Agle/brain retraining community." in case they are misunderstanding it to be the same as what 'the community of people who become ill with ME/CFS or LC would think recovery is, particularly when comparing to medical care for other serious illness'

So there is no confirmation that these people have ME/CFS or Long COvid as per the medical diagnosis definition. Or improvement or recovery as defined by medical measures or definitions.


3. the study was of interviews that I think were already on the website - were they ones that were done with Raelen Agle?

Anyway, it was Raelen who selected which of the pre-existing interviews should be included and therefore 'analysed'. So post-hoc, and cerry-picked, rather than interviews done by the researcher

Page 19
To recruit participants, all interviewees on the chosen YouTube channel were contacted about the research study by Raelan and her channel producer.

Those who replied stating that they would like their interview to be included in the study were subsequently contacted by the researcher with the formal, ethically approved documents.

This process recruited 79 participants and excluded 4 from the final dataset because their interview did not substantively discuss recovery from a first-person perspective. Thus, 75 interviews were included in the final dataset.
 
From the fascinating world of brain retraining: a pwPOTS describes how they learned to rethink what it means to recover as a chronically ill person.
Some excerpts from Twitter:
kat | dr odyssey@aladyvanished
Sep 26
when i got my POTS diagnosis my neurologist told me that i should absolutely not get involved with online communities for it bc most of the people there were obsessed with being sick forever. and at the time i was like wow that’s fucked up huh but actually she was 1000% correct
i think this is in bad faith but to answer in good faith: part of what i needed to do was rethink what “recovery” looked like, and to understand that what i was dealing with was holistic, so my treatment had to be holistic. and part of that is therapy, and changing how u think
Laser Loon @laserloony
Sep 26
One of the things that I had to come to terms with is that you don't really "recover" from any chronic illness in the way that people sometimes think. I'm going to be chronically ill until I die. What I can do is get better at managing my symptoms.



kat | dr odyssey @aladyvanished
Sep 27
oh fully agree and i’m not suggesting that at all. i needed to rewire my brain and readjust my expectations bc i was dying. and that saved my life. but i wasn’t lazy before that, and neither is anyone else. it’s just part of the process i think we have to do to survive
that was me for a really really long time and one day i woke up and i realized id come so far from the very worst part of it. and i’m never going to be “recovered,” and i’ll always be chronically ill, but i’m more functional and my life is wider and more beautiful for it
i really hope it changes for you! it helped me to accept that i was always going to be ill and that id never get back to my pre-sick self, but that i could find different ways of being functional in this new self. it took a really long time and sucked. but i’m alive!
 
From @Chandelier's post:
kat | dr odyssey @aladyvanished
Sep 27
oh fully agree and i’m not suggesting that at all. i needed to rewire my brain and readjust my expectations bc i was dying. and that saved my life. but i wasn’t lazy before that, and neither is anyone else. it’s just part of the process i think we have to do to survive
(my bold)

They were dying from POTS?
No wonder that readjusting expectations helped.
 
I've seen several discussions of toxic patient communities lately, and I'm so baffled by it. No one is forcing anyone to 1) participate in one and 2) remain in one they don't like. It's held up as this major reason why people remain ill, even though it makes zero sense. The vast majority of patients aren't even passive lurkers in such communities, and of course chronic illness existed long before social media, so it's a tiny part of the whole. But also no one is forced to be involved, literally all they have to do if they don't like a community is leave immediately and never think about it.

I have personally never seen this, but I have never been in a closed/gated community so that may be part of that. I see a lot of despair but given how much misery these people are in, it's remarkably positive and helpful. Also there are loads of studies showing that most patients find them useful, and almost every trial of a group psychobehavioral treatment cites the group as the only part they actually liked. It's one of the dominant themes in Long Covid, how the prior communities of chronically ill have been more helpful than the entire health care industry, and it's completely ignored in favor of The Narrative.

I also randomly noticed famed hater Zachary Grin, who is particularly hostile to chronically ill people, mention that he had POTS 10 years ago and recovered (didn't say how, usually it's time, so did I, mostly), and was left with intense disgust of patient communities for some reason. A lot of people are making voluntary personal experience that is more the exception than the norm influence their whole outlook on chronic illness and everyone affected by it. It's a cruel irony that those who recovered are basically some of our worst enemies, generalizing their chance experience as something anyone can achieve just because they decided that it was their own doing.

And it would be so much less awful if all of this wasn't basically reasoned using all the logical fallacies in a trench coat. I've never before seen the narrative of "some people want to recover / prefer to stay ill" from medical professionals being more prominent than this year. Things really are worse than ever, even as we slowly inch closer to a solution. This might be the only major problem affecting this many people to get solved despite nearly the entire academic discipline responsible for it acting aggressively against it.
 
From the fascinating world of brain retraining: a pwPOTS describes how they learned to rethink what it means to recover as a chronically ill person.
Some excerpts from Twitter:





See what they describe is what I’d call “learning to live well with your diagnosis”. I wouldn’t call it recovering or recovery.

It’s good though, I’m proud I managed to work all that out myself years ago without any brain training.

These people obviously needed outside help for that.
 
I've seen several discussions of toxic patient communities lately, and I'm so baffled by it. No one is forcing anyone to 1) participate in one and 2) remain in one they don't like. It's held up as this major reason why people remain ill, even though it makes zero sense.
I found it refreshing to read Nicolas et al. on that matter:
Above all, self-help groups are repeatedly problematized by representatives of psychosomatic interpretive approaches.

From the perspective of those affected by illness, self-organization constitutes a site of collective knowledge production and mutual support.

By contrast, some psychosomatic practitioners—for example, Henningsen (2025: 132 f.)—frame it as a site where supposedly inadequate illness beliefs and biologistic reductions are reinforced: membership in self-help organizations is said to carry an “unfavorable prognosis” (ibid.).

Thus, self-organization arising from lived experience and structural undersupply of care is not regarded by medicine—as opposed to other helping professions—as a resource, but is pathologized and classified as a health risk.

The responsibility of the medical system fades from view, and the protective function of self-help against medical violence is lost. At the same time, there is a risk that the psychosomatic interpretation will become further entrenched through the lens of those affected.
 
I found it refreshing to read Nicolas et al. on that matter:
Nice.

The usual then, pathologising a reasonable action in the circumstances.
Nobody can help you, no medical treatment.
Joins patient organised self-help group

Aha! You just want to be ill. Gotcha!

Are we different from the cancer patient support groups in this biologising our illness and re-informing each others problems?
 
The usual then, pathologising a reasonable action in the circumstances.
Yup. Denying the reality of the context opens up all sorts of abuse because the context explains everything and so by denying it anything can be offered as an alternative explanation, it doesn't even need to make sense. Which is exactly the definition of gaslighting and why it's so harmful, 100x so when it's combined with legal authority. It's bad enough when it's from a loved one, but the authority granted in this context makes the consequences extreme.

And course it's all so much more absurd that group therapy is often preferred because it saves on costs, and it's the only part that patients seem to enjoy. This is both gaslighting and the movie Brazil (and/or Kafka) combined.
 
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